Mitchell @convexflow

A "technology fee," eh?

Visa is in late-stage talks to buy Fireblocks for ~$2.5bn (Axios) That is roughly 70% below the $8bn valuation Fireblocks raised at in 2022. Fireblocks runs custody and wallet infrastructure for 2,400+ institutions, including BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas, and says it has secured over $10tn in transfers. It has become the biggest player in digital asset custody. But increasingly it's expanding in more directions and product cross-sell, while underneath, competitors like DFNS are winning market share and mind share. Fireblocks hasn't raised in a while. Visa's stablecoin settlement crossed a $20bn annualized run rate in September, up 15x in a year, with 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs live. They're arguably ahead on stablecoin-linked cards. Then Mastercard bought BVNK, Visa's settlement and OTC partner. While Fireblocks isn't a like-for-like (Visa now partners with many in that space), it does take custody, arguably a harder piece to do in-house. And the strategy here is fascinating to observe To my mind, Visa wants to be the provider of choice for any FI going onchain, especially the big banks. Fireblocks is a large book of enterprise clients and fits exactly where I think Visa is going. Cards are where stablecoins drive Visa today. As settlement for non-card payments starts to go onchain, Visa needs the wallet and custody plumbing underneath those flows. Fireblocks then looks like a logical play. Visa gets the enterprise relationships and the plumbing in one deal. Fireblocks customers now have a custody vendor owned by a card network, and some exchanges and Mastercard-aligned banks will think twice. DFNS and the rest now compete with a vendor that has Visa's sales team already inside the big banks. It reminds me that Standard Chartered also said it would take full ownership of Zodia Custody. Digital asset custody is consolidating into the incumbents. Visa paid $2bn for CyberSource in 2010 to own the e-commerce gateway. (Arguably no longer *the default* gateway, but certainly one that's very successful at least in part due to Visa's market distribution). This is that play for onchain. For Fireblocks, this is a down round and a half if it happens. But not dissimilar from what we've seen in SaaS with bending spoons. A lot of companies got bid up high in the 2021 era, and no matter how successful and how much revenue they pile on, it's still big shoes to fill. Fireblocks is a talent team, so I wish them well if this is true or not. Either way. Keep doing things. Visa and Fireblocks both sponsor tokenized, but as you'd hopefully imagine, I have no insight or color on this from either team and haven't spoken to anyone there about it.

nowadays, the ARR is neither Annual, Nor Recurring, Nor Revenue

Tala is a company you are not paying enough attention to Unsecured onchain credit. Embedded in wallets. $10bn lent. Exceptional risk adjusted results in "high risk" markets

Tala @talamobile

4 days ago

Tala is partnering with @eldoradoio to bring embedded credit into its wallet, launching first in Bolivia. Uncollateralized consumer credit is hard to come by in Latin America. Once live, customers can get access in seconds in USDT on @tempo. Learn more: tala.co/blog/2026/10/2…

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MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.

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The dirty secret of SAAS is that subscription pricing allows you to keep charging customers who aren't really using the product. The downside of this is that when your subscriptions finally churn, it's a *lagging indicator* of your business failing. I strongly suspect that there are many, many "dead men walking" now in SAAS, both AI-native and traditional: businesses where the financials may still look fine -- just a quarter or two of stagnant growth, margins are still great, maybe there's an AI narrative going forward, etc. but the *product* is losing utilization and they will lose every single customer to {{AI-native competitor, possibly the big labs themselves}} as the customers encounter those solutions. Those customers become dormant users, but the subscriptions still run for the while. The actual revenue churn only occurs months or quarters later when the question of "is anyone still using this? do we need to keep paying for this?" is finally answered with a "no" rather than an "i'm not sure".

dalibali @dalibali2

4 days ago

Met a multi billion construction co that ripped out CRM with vibe code + Claude for cyber. 5 months in seems to be doing fine

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Rumor mill: Anthropic is trying to teach Claude legal strategy and discretion. This is the actual gap. We’ve all seen the client “slop cannon” 33 potential issues on a contract, most of which are either non-issues or just the commercial reality of the deal. The model doesn’t know the difference, and the average user doesn’t know what context to give it to get a usable result. There’s a parallel in medicine. A paper showed frontier models, given a patient’s full records, can diagnose at the level of a competent specialist. A non-specialist doctor can hit roughly the same level even without feeding the model everything, because they already know which pieces of context matter. A patient doing the same thing is basically a WebMD lottery. Having a base understanding of how the process actually works, and knowing what to do with the output, is still the difference. I do not see discretion in a model without full context being possible. I have been shocked before but....

@soby0x @Pumpfun magic

got the HRT gang back together!

@eglyman @tryramp @tonyhawk @BAM__MARGERA

"There are some people in your org who are doing way more exploring than others. They are your early adopters. They're running Astra and Fable on the weekends on personal projects, to find things they might bring to work. The problem is that they can be a massive f*cking distraction. So the key question to ask yourself if you're running a product org is: how do I harness these early adopters without distracting everybody else?" @danshipper

New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tell…

NGMI You can control costs in many ways, but usage should be going up exponentially.

Joseph Cox @josephfcox

a week ago

New: Accenture has told employees it will only fund $29 per month of Claude use. Meaning that employees who often spend as much as $1,000 a month are now scrambling to find ways to keep access to the tool. A sign of the continuing crack down of AI 404media.co/accenture-tell…

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All of these tests are useless. Delete all of them. They provide no value

Yifei Hu @hu_yifei

a week ago

you know you vibe-coded too much when your repo has 3330 tests crafted by your favorite coding agents.

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CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…

Are you an envelope entrepreneur or a letter entrepreneur? Someone who's about the container, the business on the outside, or someone who's more focused on the letter, the product inside? You can be both, but I think most are definitely one or the other. I'm a letter guy. Here's how I think about it.

David Senra @davidsenra

8 months ago

There’s too many people playing entrepreneur:

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@danrobinson And now that the world is on fire and the barbarians are at the gate you have the audacity to come to me for help?

@FoundersPodcast I'm making my petition public -- people in the west don't understand how hardcore this guy is, such a fan

A new theory appears! @samrags_ argues that crypto gaming will work now because onboarding used to suck--seed phrases, chain selection, bridging, signing weird hex strings. That's all gone now. So finally consumer can rip. Here's the problem with that story: Consumers actually did all that shit. Sam is telling an onboarding story, but the users actually onboarded. The problem was not onboarding, it was retention. Users DID the seed phrases, they DID the bridging, they DID the exchange KYC, they DID the Fox-themed wallets and signed the hex phrases, just to try all this stuff. They just didn't stick around because the products weren't worth sticking around for. (Look at the Telegram game ecosystem, it's even more stark.) So if the problem is users never showed up, then OK, maybe your onboarding story explains it. But if they showed up and didn't retain, having stablecoins or email logins doesn't help you on retention. This story just doesn't fit. Sorry to say, your princess is in another castle.

Sam Ragsdale @samrags_

8 months ago

With all due respect to Hasseeb, I completely disagree with this take. Chris was and is a mentor to me, I'm not pretending otherwise. But neither Chris nor Haseeb are builders in the category. I have spent the last year in the trenches trying to build non-speculative consumer

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anthropic built their own git. Most interesting mental shift here, and if you buy that changing code happens more and more autonomously, faster*, then this will make a ton of sense: Git was designed so that any client could serve the repo. Fully offline, your *build time* dev stack is never in the hot path for your *run time* deployment. Anthropics new version control system (VCS) does not work offline. There’s a central server which must be reachable for clients to function. They found a bunch of benefits to doing it this way. At first this sounds wild. Today if GitHub is down, you can’t pull or push or merge. Imagine if you couldn’t COMMIT if GitHub was offline. But in a (someday, maybe) future where code changes 1000x per day with no human in the loop, then your VCS is basically part of production anyway, so you might as well lean into keeping it online with a team of SREs etc, and then you get all sorts of interesting perf benefits for CLIENTS because you can offload some processing to server and re architect what all needs to be stored where * I’m not sure I buy this, but the labs are certainly pushing “don’t read the code, leverage signals like “outage, feature request, user behavior change” as STIMULUS to agents to drive change in deployed code” as the future, so it lines up Does that make sense? Are we going back to CVS instead of distributed? Will there be another swing back to distributed 5-10 years after things like Scion become Mainstream?

Anthropic @AnthropicAI

2 weeks ago

New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control. In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day. As a result, we became bottlenecked by developer infrastructure built for human (rather than agent) scale.

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